( 1 ) What is your HPC system being used for?

Computing CNC tool paths from images.

( 2 ) How many blades, CPUs and cores are you using?

4 motherboards each with 2 of:
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 1.70GHz
cpu MHz : 1697.724

( 3 ) What OS are you running?

Linux tshwane 2.6.10-5-686-smp #1 SMP Thu Sep 8 06:40:16 UTC 2005 i686 GNU/Linux
The clustering system is built by rocketcalc and is OS independant.

( 4 ) What clustering tools are you using? (version?) – e.g. Sun Grid Engine, MPI, etc

Current toolchain is: NFS, nap. We used to use octaves (note the plural) written by Bryan W. Lewis which runs over pvm but that was not the fastest choice for the application. Now we read in images directly from the filestructure using octave fread with skip. And communicate back with NAP also by Lewis.

( 5 ) How are you interconnecting?

A very fast switchy thing interconnects the boards on ethernet.

( 6 ) Who is the CPU manufacturer?

See above.

( 7 ) How much RAM per node?

MemTotal: 1035692 kB

( 8 ) What is your Rmax, Rpeak?

I don't understand the question.

( 9 ) What are the key applications?

Image processing.

( 10 ) What are the cool applications you are running?

I wrote an audio mixer in octave over NAP one afternoon.

( 11 ) What is your biggest technical or operational bugbear?

( 12 ) What is your next step in technology?

This cluster is 4 years old and still making money. Computation is no longer a bottleneck in our processess. We plan to sit back for a while and enjoy the good life.

( 13 ) How many users?

One login but the code is used for 300 or so customers, thousands of jobs and millions of holes.

( 14 ) Do you use virtualisation?

No

( 15 ) What software development process do you use. And tools? Language? Frameworks?

OS Level interfacing (files, pipes), Make, octave, PostScript.

( 16 ) Do you have a public ganglia?

Hope not, I haven't checked yet.

( 17 ) How do 3rd parties get to use your machine?

The machine is a Personal Cluster. We recommend you buy your own.

Thanks James!

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